HOLLAND PATENT -- In the fall of 1904, rural mail carrier Ellis Jones gathered together a group to build a telephone line from Stittville to Camroden.
That group of 10 men installed the poles, strung the line and were able to listen to the results of the presidential election between Theodore Roosevelt and Alton Park over the telephone.
In 1905, under the leadership of Jones, the Oneida County Rural Telephone, was incorporated.
A century later, the company, now known as Northland Communications, is still going strong and still under the direction of the McCarthy family, which has operated the company since Peter E. McCarthy acquired it in 1926.
Northland Chief Executive Officer Jeremiah McCarthy, who has led the company since 1967, said independent companies have to deal with much uncertainty because the telecommunications industry is always in a state of flux.
"What is certain is that the product mix will be different," he said. "Telephone companies will need to provide more than just dial tone and long distance."
In addition to telephone service, the company offers high-speed Internet connections, telephone hardware and software systems and a paging service through a host of affiliate companies under the Northland Communications umbrella.
McCarthy has welcomed his children, James McCarthy, Mary Malone McCarthy and Maureen McCarthy Tracy into the business.
Jeremiah McCarthy said he has seen a lot of changes through the years, such as an increasing rural population as people moved out of the city.
As its customer base has grown -- Northland now serves 3,800 access lines over 124 square miles -- the company has continued to work to improve service.
"The company responded to this growth with additional capital spending, building a redundant fiber ring throughout the entire Holland Patent and Westernville area," McCarthy said.
The fiber optic cables automatically reroute themselves through the ring if there's a break in the connection, providing customers with continuous service, he said. It also allowed
the company to begin offering high-speed Internet connections to customers.
Services such as that are what helps keep independent telephone companies competitive with telecommunications giants such as Verizon, said Thomas McPhail, a professor of media studies at the University of Missouri at St. Louis.
"They have got to have a full range of services," McPhail said.
One of the next ventures the company would like to get into is offering cable television -- one part of the essential "triple play" of services, said James McCarthy, Northland's president. Voice, video and data are the three services independents need to provide to remain competitive, he said.
The company is working with a group of other independent companies to break into the cable television business. The signals can be transmitted right over existing telephone lines, McCarthy said.
"That's what our competition is doing," he said. "We need to be geared up to do the same thing."
Over the years, many independent telephone companies have closed up or sold out to larger companies, McPhail said, so it's a testament to Oneida County Rural Telephone's management and innovation that they have hit the 100-year-mark and are still going strong.
"AT&T was an elephant, and this group was a mouse," he said. "And it hasn't been stepped on for 100 years."
(TRACI GREGORY Observer-Dispatch 6/5/05)
